TRACK TRAFFICKING

“One of the most conspicuous ones are gifts of enslaved people between different sovereign rulers or between vassals and sovereign rulers. And so we find in, for example, Chronicles, that when this Caliphate had just founded the new city of Cairo as their imperial capital... this was a way that diplomacy was done. And in turn, the Fatimid Caliphs will send their own gifts of enslaved people and eunuchs even to the Emperor of Byzantium.”

“Everyone in the Mediterranean, including Jews, Christians, and Muslims, understood that depending on the place they're in, they are vulnerable to enslavement, whether if it's through capture and war or through piracy. We have evidence that Jewish leaders were trying to raise money to redeem Jewish captives, and that was seen as a sort of obligation that the community had. All people are vulnerable to slavery, but also it's very common that those same groups are people who own slaves.”

“The important thing I want to underscore is that both in Islam, both in Jewish culture and religion, like slave owners tell themselves stories of good and bad slave owners. And so they really, and this is important because they never arrive, I don't think, at a critique of slavery as an institution, because they are focused on like the problem is what slavery has done badly. And that unscrupulous men don't follow the laws of slavery like they should.”

“The slave trader in the period that I study, it mainly appears as a diffuse capillary network in which small numbers of enslaved people are parts of mixed cargoes, and they're sent with handlers through a series of ports until they reach their final destination. This capillary network could stretch all the way to India if you're a merchant in Cairo. And so we have Jewish merchants, for example, who were traveling to Indian Ocean, and they write home and they say, look, I purchased a six-year-old girl for the lady of the house.”

“What does the Geniza provide? It provides something of you from the bottom up, I would say, so we get more glimpses of everyday life. The cache of materials are really dense. So we have an interconnected cast of characters, and we're able to tell different kinds of histories from the ground up that we don't necessarily have the same opportunity to tell on the basis of sources that people have focused on more so over the last century and a half of scholarship.”

“In Islamic law, there's an extra benefit that enslaved women have in particular that doesn't exist in Jewish law. And it's because of patrilineal dissent in Islam. So a Muslim man can legally use an enslaved woman for sex and her child is a freeborn Muslim. So the child is born free and the mother, the slave mother, she gains limited protection. And in most schools of Islamic law, she can't then be sold or separated from her child.”

“In Jewish law, the moment a Jewish slave owner purchases a person, that enslaved person enters a liminal category in which they're neither fully Jewish, but neither are they non-Jewish. Take a second to digest that. It is confusing. They're a kind of Jew, but not fully. This, I think, imparts dynamics in the Jewish community where enslaved people... there was a sense that they were part of the Jewish community in a provisional, tentative sense.”

“Maimonides says, look, it's better that he free her and marry her. In other words, it's better to take the lesser of these two evils. So this shows you that, like, there's not sort of one single mind about slavery, even in through the writings of one individual. And so the way slavery was thought of, like, it's really dependent on context. It is both moral sort of challenge, perhaps moral evil. It is also seen as something that's prestigious.”